How the Breaking News Network helps publicize music festivals using social media

Musical events are ideal for social media commentary and enhancing marketing opportunities that align with involving loyal enthusiastic fans. For example, Facebook can capture fan interest at a personal level; San Francisco’s Outside Lands Facebook page acts as an event guide for the three day summer festival. In only its second year, Chicago’s weeklong Revolution 2012 Beethoven Festival between September 8-16 has distinguished itself by attracting great international talent. We’re proud to work with them.

Through our friend Steve Takaki, who worked with the Revolution 2012 organizing team, we set up a new way for fans to follow the festival in real time through the week. We started by preparing the Revolution 2012 Twitter feed @Beethoven_Fest with a preset series of tweets that would publicize hourly the next workshop or concert about to happen. We would make the tweets informative and clickworthy by linking to artists’ websites, YouTube videos and related music media commentary.

Finally, we developed a nationwide Twitter and Facebook campaign to publicize Revolution 2012 despite the fact that the festival served the Chicago community. We wanted to bring national attention to a festival that deservedly needs to be placed on the future calendars’ of artists and classical music fans alike.

Music orgs, we’re live-streaming Chicago’s Beethoven Festival this week @ om.ly/BwwnH as a public service. We support the arts!

We succeeded in boosting the presence of Revolution 2012 via social media not only for the Chicago audience but for classical fans across America. For upcoming cultural events, we plan to bolster the social media presence using Pinterest and Facebook in a similar visual style. The real mission is to give audiences more resources to not only understand the artists and the music, but to participate in commenting on the performances and festival happenings. Before social media, fan interaction stopped once the concerts were over. We now want to ensure that conversations around Beethoven and Revolution 2012 remain persistent year long so its growing audience is primed to attend when the September 2013 event rolls around. This will work for any festival.

For more information on how to set up festival social media, please contact us at thebreakingnewsnetwork@gmail.com.